Israel’s latest attacks on Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon have left over 600 people dead, including Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, and hundreds more injured. They have possibly decapitated the top leadership of the most aggressive semi-state actor in the Levant.
Israel’s ground offensive was followed by Iran’s missile attack in retaliation to Nasrallah’s assassination. The world now awaits Israel’s response. These ominous developments have set the stage for a dangerous escalation with no off ramps.
The conflict that commenced on October 7, 2023, with Hamas attacking and murdering hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians and taking many others hostage was followed by a disproportionate Israeli response that has left over 40,000 dead in Gaza in a yearlong retaliation.
Such a cycle of violence has been repeating incessantly since the British mandate over Palestine expired on May 14, 1948, and the state of Israel was carved into existence from Palestine. However, the conflict’s genesis is much deeper and has everything to do with the broader reorganisation of West Asia after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the first world war.
Some terms deserve to be explained before delving into the history.
Today, Palestine is a disjointed geographical expanse in the eastern Mediterranean region bordered by Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. It is part of the wider span called the Levant, which was a junction of various cultures and empires across antiquity. The term Levant traces its etymology to the Latin levare, meaning ‘to raise’—denoting the direction of sunrise. From 1497, Levant has found mention in the English language for Mediterranean lands to the east of Italy.
Before 1948, a diverse population of Arabs, Jews and Christians lived in the Palestine region. These religious and ethnic assemblages had sacred ties to this region, specifically to the city of Jerusalem. This acreage had been subjugated and governed by various kingdoms across history—the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and eventually the Islamic caliphate and Ottoman empire.
The Jews who migrated to Palestine fleeing anti-semitism, primarily in Europe in the late 19th century, frequently encountered intense Arab hostility. Europe had a long history of Jewish persecution predating the Holocaust by several centuries.
According to a widely-accepted definition, anti-semitism is a prejudiced perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-semitism are directed towards Jewish individuals and property, including towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
Anti-semitism in Europe, in turn, gave rise to Zionism in the late 19th century. The Viennese writer Nathan Birnbaum coined the term in 1885. Theodor Herzl, the creator of the Zionist movement, called for the restoration of the Jewish state in 1896 and the first Zionist congress took place in Basel in 1897. Zionism was originally an international movement meant to establish a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine; it later morphed into a support structure for the modern Israeli state.
Concurrent to these events, there were wider changes taking place in world affairs by the first half of the 1910s. The first world war commenced in 1914 with the Turkish Ottoman Empire aligning itself with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to confront Britain and France. Early in the war, the foreign offices of France, Russia, Great Britain and Italy assigned a select group of diplomats to determine each country’s share of inheritance from the tottering Ottoman Empire, which was dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’.
These negotiations were primarily carried out by two men—Mark Sykes, an intrepid Briton, and François Georges-Picot, a French diplomat who carved up the Levant into British and French spheres of power by establishing five distinct entities under direct British or French control. The Sykes-Picot agreement signed on May 16, 1916, divided the map of one of the most volatile regions in the world with complete disregard to ethnic and religious considerations. This agreement is the fundamental cause of many a conflict in the Levant, even a century later.
On November 2, 1917, Britain issued a public declaration proclaiming its unequivocal commitment to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The statement came in the form of a letter written by then foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walther Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish Committee. It was then included in the terms of the British mandate for Palestine after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. This led to the establishment of the Israeli state when the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, turning the Palestinian issue over to the newly-formed United Nations.
There was nothing wrong in giving a national home in 1948 to the Jewish people, who had recently been at the receiving end of one of the most horrendous atrocities ever during the Holocaust. But the two-state solution proposed at the UN in 1948, which called for the new shape of Palestine as a separate homeland for Arab Muslims and other communities, was never properly implemented as envisaged in UN Resolutions 181 & 181 (ii) of November 29, 1947, because the Arab states of West Asia rejected it as void ab initio.
Though after the Oslo accords in the early 1990s, a truncated Palestinian state did come into existence with the West Bank (of Jordan river) under the control of the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip, which later came under the hegemony of the militant Hamas, the very heavy Israeli security significantly transgressed into the autonomy of both these entities.
In the 2000s, American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan once again unleashed the region’s tectonic forces. It brought ‘the Shia Crescent’ into existence underpinned by Iran. The Hezbollah is one of the aggressive manifestations of this crescent, though it had initially emerged as a consequence of the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and 80s.
The plight of the Palestinian people has been a rallying cause across West Asia for over seven decades now. The latest heavy-handed Israeli response only serves to internationalise their cause once again. Israel has to realise that a two-state solution is in its best interests, too. However, confronted with hostile neighbours who publicly declare their avowed objective is to wipe Israel off the map, Israel’s security dilemmas are only too real.
The cycle of counter-responses has paved the path of an uncontrolled—and perhaps uncontrollable—escalation that will have portentous consequences in the days ahead.
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)
Manish Tewari | Lawyer, MP and former I&B minister